UM Recruits Yin Woon Rani as N.A. president

Ran GlaxoSmithKline at Grey

Universal McCann tapped Grey Worldwide’s Yin Woon Rani as president of the Interpublic media network’s North American operations. Rani, who starts her new job on Nov. 1, succeeds Jacki Kelley, who was named global CEO of UM last January.

In her UM role, Rani joins two other UM cluster presidents: Jim Hytner of G14 and Mauricio Sabogal of World Markets. Earlier this year UM’s parent Mediabrands, Interpublic’s media unit, restructured its traditional geographic model into three clusters: G14, World Markets, and North America. The G14 unit includes UM offices in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, and the U.K. Countries in the World Markets group are Austria, Belgium, Greece, the Middle East, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam.

Rani, who was a svp, director of strategy and account director at Grey, most recently ran the GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare team. New to the operations of a media agency, she also worked on Grey accounts like Procter & Gamble, M&M/Mars, J.M. Smucker’s Co. and Hasbro.